Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Topic: Trade and Immigration

Further to Dan’s post today, some more depressing news today on the farm bill process. A couple of amendments that would have trimmed some excess fat also failed.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H) has proposed a number of amendments to the farm bill. The two that failed today were designed to strike a couple of almost comic provisions of the farm bill that emerged from the Senate Agriculture Committee. The first, to strike language that establishes a “Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network,” a mental health program for farmers, failed 37-58. The other, to strike a new program to provide subsidies for asparagus producers, failed 39-56. (Roll call records are not yet available)

Now, I am willing to concede that farming might be stressful at times (although Mencken would disagree). I certainly wouldn’t like getting out of bed at dawn to milk cows. And I am sure it is a tough business, rearing asparagus. But I once saw a stockbroker outside the NYSE smoking two cigarettes at once, and looking decidedly harried. And I bet he earned less than some farmers. Where’s his taxpayer-funded “stress assistance network?”

This is a further sign of the truly staggering resistance to reform U.S. agricultural policy. Tom Harkin (D., IA), Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said that the proposed reforms of the Lugar-Lautenberg amendment were “too far too fast.”

Too fast? These programs have been with us for over 70 years, Senator.

When Democrats regained control of Congress after the 2006 election, they promised to pursue fiscal discipline and bring the curtain down on “business as usual” and the “culture of corruption” in Washington. Apparently U.S. agricultural programs were exempted from any of those promises.

In a perfectly bipartisan vote yesterday, the Senate rejected a modest reform amendment to the 2007 farm bill. Sponsored by Sens. Richard Lugar, R-IN, and Frank Lautenburg, D-NJ, the amendment would have repealed Depression-era farm programs that deliver huge subsidies to a relatively small number of farmers who grow so-called program crops—corn, cotton, rice, wheat and soybeans—and import protection for sugar and dairy.

The amendment would have replaced those programs with a generously subsidized system of insurance. While still far removed from the free market, the proposed alternative would have been less costly and market-distorting than the current system.

Yet even such an incremental step away from our current command-and-control farm policies went down in flames by a 37 to 58 margin (Senate roll call vote no. 417). Voting against the reform were exactly 29 Democrats and 29 Republicans. When it comes to farm programs, neither party represents the majority of Americans who must pay the high cost of U.S. farm programs. [The Center for Trade Policy Studies has documented the cost and proposed a plan to bring U.S. farm programs into the 21st century.]

Not surprisingly, with the Iowa presidential caucuses less than three weeks away, the five senators who were absent from the vote are all busy running for president!

I’ve spent the last few months studying and writing about electronic employment eligibility verification. This is the idea of requiring every employer in the country to check the immigration status of employees against Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration databases. A nationwide EEV program, building on the current Basic Pilot/”E-Verify” program, was treated as a matter of near consensus at the beginning of this past summer’s immigration debate, and the Department of Homeland Security continues to promote it.

There are a lot of weaknesses in EEV. Foremost, such a system would be subject to a lot of document fraud, just like today’s Form I-9. Requiring employers to collect these forms and check the documentation of new employees doesn’t do much to control illegal immigration.

If this process were “strengthened” with a national EEV system, continuing document fraud would drive policymakers inexorably toward “strengthening” the identity cards used in the system. Indeed, the leading immigration bill this summer would have required every new hire in America to present a REAL ID-compliant national ID card. EEV requires a national ID.

This is fine by many people who are angered by illegal immigration. But the folks who want EEV and a national ID might want to be careful what they wish for.

A group called Mayors Against Illegal Guns recently sent a letter to all the major presidential candidates asking a detailed set of questions about their positions on gun control. Among them:

… Do you support a change in federal law to require that gun purchasers show Real ID-compliant identification by 2013?

I believe that REAL ID will not be implemented. In fact, the presence of REAL ID in the immigration bill is what killed it. But if EEV goes forward, it could bring REAL ID back from the dead.

With a national ID and a national infrastructure for regulating individual behavior in place, advocates will immediately seek to expand its uses - including to gun control. So it seems that those fervent opponents of illegal immigration who want a national EEV system have a choice: Will you give up your guns to get rid of illegal immigrants?

Jimmy Carter’s grasp of economics apparently hasn’t sharpened in the 27 years since he imparted a wretched U.S. economy to his successor. Or perhaps his poor-man-advocate bona fides should be scrutinized more closely.

In a Washington Postop-ed today, the former president rightly protests the egregious U.S. farm bill for its continuation of lavish subsidies to American commodities’ producers. Carter explains how subsidies breed overproduction, which suppresses world commodity prices, thereby reducing the incomes of poor farmers in countries where commodities dominate the economy.

Carter favors proposed amendments to the current farm legislation that would replace subsidy programs with crop insurance programs to protect farmers against excessive loss, which is an improvement, though not a solution.

But, in the last paragraph of his article, Carter contradicts everything he writes before that, revealing himself to be no friend of poor farmers abroad or simply ignorant of economic processes. He writes:

I am still a cotton farmer, and I have been in the fields in Mali, where all the work is done by families with small land holdings. Cotton production costs 73 cents per pound in the United States and only 21 cents per pound in West Africa, so American farmers do need protection in the international marketplace.

Now wait a second. This is a very curious statement. If cotton production is so much cheaper in West Africa than in the United States, then more production should happen there and less should happen here. If Carter is really interested in the well-being of West African farmers, “whose scant livelihood depends on cotton production,” he should advocate free trade in cotton. Why instead does he advocate that U.S. farmers be protected in the international market place? West African incomes will continue to suffer if U.S. subsidy programs are replaced by U.S. tariffs, which is what Carter seems to be advocating. How does it help Malian farmers lift themselves out of poverty if they can’t effectively compete on their advantages? Higher U.S. tariffs would only drive down the world price (as subsidies do) and likely compel other importer nations to raise tariffs to protect their own producers, shrinking the market further for Malian farmers.

Meanwhile, does Carter have any empathy for America’s lower income families?Apparently, not enough. Protection of U.S. cotton farmers artificially raises the prices of textiles, which means that clothing and shoes are more expensive than they would be otherwise. Expenditures on necessities, like clothing and food, account for a higher proportion of the budgets of lower income families. Thus, artificially raising the prices of those products is akin to a regressive tax – it burdens those with less income disproportionately.

Perhaps Carter is not writing as the founder of the Carter Center, an international NGO, as the byline indicates, but as a small cotton farmer from Plains, Georgia, who believes the current subsidy system unfair because the big farms get most of the largesse.

The Senate re-commenced debating the farm bill on Friday, after Democrats and Republicans struck an agreement over the amendments process (see my earlier blog entry here). Senate leaders are hoping that they can get a bill passed by the holiday recess, and on to conference early in the new year.

Although President Bush has threatened to veto the bill that emerged from the Senate Agriculture Committee (the bill being debated now), as well as the House Farm Bill passed in July, powerful members of Congress don’t seem too rattled. According to a recent article, Colin Peterson (chair of the House Agriculture Committee) is fairly confident that he and President Bush can get together, just the two of them nice and cozy, and come to an agreement. The money quote:

…if we can get all of these other people out of this thing and just sit down and say, ‘Look, for the betterment of the country, hopefully we can work this out.’ That’s my plan.

By “all these other people”, Mr Peterson presumably means you and I, and anyone else who is unhappy with the current state of agriculture policy in America. So sit tight, everybody, and wait for the check (currently $288 billion worth).

The United States and China reached an agreement yesterday on a dispute over alleged Chinese export subsidies. In exchange for the U.S. government dropping a case it was pursuing through the World Trade Organization, China agreed to end subsidies that the U.S. claimed were promoting exports and hindering imports of steel, wood, IT products, and other manufactured goods.

Details of the case aside, the announcement shows how trade disputes with China can be resolved without resort to threats of retaliatory tariffs. This is not the first time China has changed its trade laws in response to pressure from the United States through the WTO. In 2004, China dropped a discriminatory tax refund on domestically produced semiconductors after the U.S. government filed a complaint.

Today’s announcement is another vindication of resolving trade disputes with China through a rules-based system rather than through threats of unilateral retaliation. China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 not only committed China to lowering trade barriers on a broad range of goods and services; it also brought China into the generally effective WTO dispute settlement mechanism.

In two weeks, Treasury Secretary Paulson, U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab and other cabinet members will meet with their Chinese counterparts in Beijing as part of the ongoing Strategic Economic Dialogue. As today’s announcement verifies, the SED represents the right approach to encouraging China to continue its evolution toward a more free and open economy.

A news story and op-ed in the Washington Post recently noted that about 35 million Americans, or more than 10% of the population, are “food insecure.” It sounds like there is a massive underclass of people in the nation who are so poor that they can’t get enough to eat and are going hungry. No doubt that is the idea that many articles want to put across on the reader.

But is the hunger problem really that big? Let’s go to the official definitions and data at the Department of Agriculture:

It seems to me that it’s only the “very food insecure” folks who might be sometimes going hungry. Less than 3% of the population is very food insecure at any time during a given month, and that drops to less than 1% on any given day.

Douglas Besharov has argued that the main food-related health problem today is obesity, not hunger. Poor Americans are generally suffering not from too little food, but from too much of the wrong kinds of food.

According to federal data, about two-thirds of American adults are “overweight” and about half of those are “obese.” Those rates are actually higher for adults below the poverty level. Similarly, children below the poverty line are more likely to be overweight than other children.

Despite these modern realities, food subsidy programs continue to support an out-of-date model of increasing the caloric intake of low-income Americans. It’s time to cut them. See further discussion here.